Iranian students protested and shopkeepers went on strike in the face of the growing crackdown, according to social media reports. Martha Her demonstrations over Amini’s death lasted for his 50 days.
Saturday’s protests came as President Ebrahim Raisi said Iran’s cities were “safe and sound” after he previously dismissed U.S. President Joe Biden’s pledge to “liberate Iran.” I was.
The Islamic Republic is embroiled in protests that erupted when Amini died in custody after being arrested on suspicion of violating the country’s women’s dress code.
As Labor Week began, security forces adopted new measures to stop protests at Tehran’s universities, searching students and forcing them to remove their face masks, activists said.
But demonstrators were heard chanting “I am a free woman, you are a pervert” at the Islamic Azad University in Mashhad, northeast Iran, in a video released by BBC Persian. .
“Students die but do not accept humiliation,” sang a student at Gilan University in the northern city of Rasht in a video posted online by activists.
In the northwestern city of Qazbin, dozens of people chanted similar slogans at a memorial service 40 days after the death of demonstrator Jawad Heydari.
A Norwegian-based Hengau rights group said people were observing “widespread strikes” in Amini’s hometown of Sakez, Kurdistan state, with shops closed.
A video later aired by Manoth, a television channel based abroad and banned in Iran, appeared to show students trapped at Islam Azad University in northern Tehran.
Unrest continues as Iran’s powerful militia, the Revolutionary Guards, launched a new satellite-carrying rocket on Saturday, state television reported.
Iranian state television said the security forces had successfully launched a solid-fuel rocket called the Ghaem-100 satellite carrier, airing dramatic footage of the rocket taking off from a desert launch pad into cloudy skies. It has not revealed a place similar to the Sharod desert in northeastern Iran.
The state-run IRNA news agency reported that the carrier could put a satellite weighing 80kg into orbit about 500km from Earth.
The US State Department called the launch “useless and precarious.” Washington fears that the same long-range ballistic technology used to put satellites into orbit could also be used to launch nuclear warheads. Tehran has regularly denied that he has such intentions.
The Oslo-based Iranian human rights group said on Saturday that at least 186 people were killed in the protest crackdown, an increase of 10 from Wednesday.
Sistan Baluchistan, a predominantly Sunni Muslim province in the southeast that borders Afghanistan and Pakistan, said another 118 people had died in separate protests since September 30.
Officials in Kerman province admitted they were struggling to quell the protests that erupted after Amini’s death on September 16.
“Internet restrictions, arrests of riot leaders, and the presence of the state in the streets have always ruled out agitation, but this kind of agitation and its audience are different,” said a state political and security official. One Rahman Jalali said. , the ISNA news agency was quoted as saying.
Iran is trying to blame its arch-enemy the United States for the protests, and Raisi said on Saturday that Washington tried and failed to repeat the 2011 Arab uprising in the Islamic Republic, Iranian media reported.
Raisi has previously dismissed Biden’s promise to “liberate Iran”, arguing that Iran had already been liberated by overthrowing the Western-backed monarch in 1979.
In November 1979, at a rally commemorating the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by radical students, he said, “Our young men and young women are determined that you will carry out your satanic desires.” I will never let it go,” he said.
Biden said Friday while campaigning for the US midterm elections, “Don’t worry, we will liberate Iran. They will be free soon.”
U.S. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby downplayed Biden’s remarks, saying, “The president, quite frankly, was expressing solidarity with the protesters, as he’s done from the beginning.
On Friday, Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency platform, admitted that funds belonging to or intended for Iranians flowed through its services, potentially violating US sanctions. .
